The Impact of "The War
Even though the stories in this collection—with the exception of the work-in-progress “Daybreak at Pisa”—are set in post-WWII society, the specter of that global engagement hangs over the entire collection like a shadowy incarnation of a character itself. Except for the story actually titled “War” (which, though set in the past, is told from the perspective of an adult looking back on childhood and thus is psychologically set in the same post-war reality as the rest), the stories do not really deal explicitly with World War II. The methodology of how this theme plays out is set three pages into the opening selection, “Lemonade” when the central defining event of its young protagonist is introduced almost subliminally:
“Mrs. Renalda Harper Dewey, widow of Harper Peter Dewey the First, (killed in the battle for Caen, August 1994, the year after Harper P. Dewy the Second’s birth)”
Portrait of the Artist
The dominant theme of any collection of short stories that is comprised of and arranged according to the chronological progression of publication or composition is baked into the structural design. Some short story collections are designed with a specific unifying force in mind. They may be linked by recurring characters or location or theme or genre or any of dozens of other controlling literary elements. The collection that is purely comprehensive of the author’s body of work in which the reader working the way from the first page to the last confronts each new story in the same exact order in which the author created them may also be linked by those same literary elements, but only secondarily. First and foremost and the only irrefutably true interpretation of unifying theme is Dinner Along the Amazon and similar comprehensive chronologically-based collections is that of the development of the mind of the writer. By tracing the path of recurring imagery, symbolism, motifs, subject matter and a host of other techniques drawn upon during the creative process, the theme which emerges most strongly defined is the evolution of the artist at work.
The Nature of Storytelling
Absent the imposition of a unifying thematic connection between stories in a chronologically based collection likes this one, another built-in theme worth exploring in such volumes is the author’s philosophy of the art of the narrative. In this case, the author facilitates things by strongly hinting at his underlying philosophy in the opening of one of the stories itself. “Losers, Finders, Strangers at the Door” commences with a poetic epigraph:
“Some lives
are only seen
through windows
beyond which
the appearance
of laughter
and of screaming
is the same.”
This alone would be enough to convince many of the author’s philosophical approach to storytelling, but this epigraph leads directly into the opening line of the story:
“….there are not beginnings, not even to stories. There are only places where you make an entrance into some else’s life and either stay or turn and go away.”
Don Murray authors a convincing analysis of the stories in Dinner along the Amazon published in the journal Studies in Canadian Literature which he argues that “optical imagery is Findley's primary means of projecting his imagined world into the reader's purview.” In other words, the act of reading the stories are thematically designed to be precisely what he describes in the epigraph: peering through the windows into the lives of characters who are in turn peering through the windows into the lives of others.
